Free Republic

War erupted at Columbia University when lefty faculty and students mobilized to torpedo an ICE recruitment event the school dared to post. The meltdown was triggered by an ad this week on the website of Columbia’s School of Professional Studies for a Feb. 18 US Customs and Border Protection virtual career expo. “Help defend the homeland,” reads the description of the event seeking to recruit for thousands of “mission critical positions,” and promising various Department of Homeland Security agencies in attendance. “This is a unique opportunity to learn more about our mission and how you could contribute to it, making...

A one-of-its-kind flag that draped former President Abraham Lincoln’s casket during his funeral procession has found a new home in the Big Apple — at a Midtown steakhouse. Keens Steakhouse, the 141-year-old white tablecloth joint known for its extensive collection of Americana memorabilia, unveiled the gargantuan, half-million dollar auction find during a private unveiling ceremony Thursday. “It’s truly a treasure,” Keens Steakhouse general manager Julia Lisowski told The Post of the historic flag, which was used in procession after Lincoln was assassinated in office in 1865. “It’s a really special and amazing piece of history that we are so honored...

New Yorkers are embracing a free market. Hundreds of people lined up Thursday for a chance to shop at the city’s “first free grocery store” — launched by Polymarket as it and other prediction betting platforms face increased scrutiny from state regulators. The West Village shop — an apparent nod to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s government-run grocery store pitch — drew more than 400 New Yorkers, who lined up hours ahead of the 2 p.m. opening, eager to fill blue tote bags with no-cost produce, nonperishables and toiletries. “Times are hard. Things are very expensive, so this helps,” said Forest Hills...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., alleged at the Munich Security Conference on Friday that U.S. aid to the Jewish state enabled a genocide by Israel. AOC’s attack on the Jewish state in Munich unfolded in the birthplace of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement that carried out the worst genocide in human history. During the town hall event in Munich, the Squad member said, "To me, this isn't just about a presidential election. Personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws. And I think that personally, that the idea of completely unconditional...

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) tapped as his health czar the founder of a left-wing nonprofit that registered patients in mental hospitals to vote. Mamdani selected Alister Martin on Jan. 31 to lead the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Martin, a former emergency room doctor, launched Vot-ER in 2019, a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic. The group creates materials for doctors to register their patients to vote in clinical settings. One of its earlier partners, the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, is an inpatient clinic for people with psychotic disorders. Citing the "therapeutic" benefits of voting, the...

The Times Guild Bargaining Committee sent staffers a newsletter on Tuesday detailing the latest labor negotiations. The Guild said it made a "big push to end the two-tier system The New York Times created and perpetuates by wrongly excluding jobs and workers from the Times Guild" and received a revised proposal from the company to end all hybrid work guarantees on March 1, 2027. "At that point, they would have the right to require us to work in the office five days a week and to eliminate our contractually guaranteed three weeks of remote work per year. As we saw...

A Yeshiva University student was attacked by several “masked thugs” in a Washington Heights subway station on Thursday night, according to school officials and authorities. Just after 7 p.m., police responded to a 911 call about an assault at the West 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue 1 train stop, according to the NYPD. The 20-year-old student of the private Jewish university was punched and kicked by four unidentified individuals, according to police and Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin, a clinical assistant professor of Jewish values at Yeshiva’s Sy Syms School of Business.

An Ohio State professor was suspended for allegedly attacking a journalist who was trying to confront the university’s former president after footage of the assault went viral. Luke Perez, an assistant professor in the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, was in a Smith Laboratory hallway talking to two freelance reporters when he launched his alleged attack on February 9. One victim, identified as Michael Neuman, attempted to walk past Perez when the staff member snatched at the man’s phone before grabbing the journalist and dropping him to the floor, according to the footage initially shared by...

Chaos and fury erupted Monday in New York City’s affluent Upper East Side as residents packed a public meeting in protest of a planned homeless shelter they said "reeks of a for-profit intent." The women's shelter, which was converted from a men’s center after massive public pushback, is slated to open around April and will accommodate up to 250 women. At a Community Board 8 Manhattan meeting hosted by Housing Solutions of New York (HSNY), opponents sounded alarms over the shelter’s proximity to schools and daycare centers. Residents also accused city officials of deliberately rushing the process to limit community...

Republican officials and candidates in Texas have shifted their rhetorical attack lines from the border fears that dominated recent elections to the state’s growing Muslim population, with language that echoes the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric has unnerved many in the state’s Islamic community while sending signals to Republicans outside Texas who might be searching for rhetorical targets now that the nation’s southwestern border has grown quiet. Ads for Senator John Cornyn of Texas have touted his fight against “radical Islam.” Texas Republican lawmakers created a “Sharia-Free America Caucus” in Congress....

Mayor Zohran Mamdani told state lawmakers on Wednesday that the only way out of the city’s $12 billion budget gap is to raise taxes on the wealthy. Hizzoner, during his first Tin Cup Day in Albany, formally called on the state Legislature to raise income taxes on people making more than $1 million by 2%. “I’m asking for a 2% raise in personal income taxes on the most affluent New Yorkers, someone earning $1 million a year. The top 1% of New York City can afford to contribute $20,000 more in taxes,” the young mayor said. “That 2% tax alone...

New York City officials plan to reraise a pride flag at the federal monument at Stonewall in Manhattan, setting up a potential fight with the White House at the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement nearly 60 years ago. Federal officials quietly took the flag down after the Trump administration in January issued guidance drastically limiting the types of flags that could be displayed at sites managed by the National Park Service. But Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal said in an interview Tuesday that he and other New York City-area politicians would reraise the flag at the federal monument...

You may vote red or blue, but would you rather live in a blue state or a red state? Regardless of what people do at the ballot box, newly released data from the Census Bureau overwhelmingly show people voting with their feet, leaving blue states for red states. And this is nothing new.From July 2024 to July 2025 (the latest numbers available), blue states like California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts hemorrhaged their most valuable resource—people—at an alarming rate.These were the five worst states for net domestic migration, meaning more people left those states than moved in, for...

The Justice Department accused two men of stealing $120 million from federal health care programs over the course of a decade by bribing patients to enroll in social adult day cares and submit unneeded prescriptions to a pharmacy. Inwoo Kim, 42, and Daniel Lee, 56, were charged with conspiracy to commit health care fraud. They each face up to 10 years in prison. “Today’s complaint targets those who prey upon the vulnerable so they can steal from American taxpayers and defraud government programs meant to help the public,” A. Tysen Duva, who leads the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in...

The House this week is set to take up the SAVE America Act (the SAVE Act 2.0), an election-integrity measure that some Senate Republicans can’t seem to get behind even though the vast majority of Americans already have. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s office confirms the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register and photo identification to vote in federal elections, will hit the floor on Tuesday. While Democrats will spend hours making a mockery of truth and reality in opposing it, the legislation is expected to pass mostly along party lines — as the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic leaders say a proposal from the White House is “incomplete and insufficient” as they are demanding new restrictions on President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and threatening a shutdown of the Homeland Security Department. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement late Monday that a White House counterproposal to the list of demands they transmitted over the weekend “included neither details nor legislative text” and does not address “the concerns Americans have about ICE’s lawless conduct.” The White House proposal was not released publicly. Schumer and Jeffries have said...

An outspoken global actor in the grand theater of climate policy, New York has long insisted the transition to green energy would be cheap and straightforward. For years, state leaders have promised aggressive emissions cuts at little cost. Now, reality is crashing the party, and the state has been caught out in that fib. Facing a court-imposed Friday deadline, New York has effectively conceded that its green goals would pose “costs consumers simply cannot bear.” This admission exposes the gaps between lofty ambition and the harsh economic realities of rapid decarbonization. The state’s 2019 climate legislation made grand, sweeping promises....

The news in October that stars and coaches from America’s National Basketball Association, the NBA, were allegedly involved in a $7 million illegal gambling operation — involving what prosecutors described as “x-ray poker tables” and “sunglasses to read the backs of playing cards” — was all the more alarming for who their co-conspirators were said to be. More than 30 people were arrested in a sweeping FBI investigation, among them members of an organisation as infamous as the NBA is famous, and one that many believed had long faded from view: La Cosa Nostra, the Italian-American mafia. “New York City’s...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani committed a cardinal sin last week by dissing millions of area Catholics as the first city mayor in nearly 100 years — and possibly ever — to skip the local archbishop’s installation. Ronald Hicks, 58, on Friday became the 11th archbishop of the New York Archdiocese since 1850, accepting the reins of power from Cardinal Timothy Dolan at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in a packed historic ceremony steeped in ritual. One of the event’s traditions — dating back to at least 1939, when then-New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia attended the installation of famous top clergyman Francis Spellman...

A total of 18 people have died as a result of a period of extreme cold weather in New York City, its mayor has said. Since late January, the city has endured a cold snap, including 13 days of temperatures of 0C (32F) or below – one of the longest stretches of sub-zero weather New York has seen in six decades. Over the weekend, another person "lost their life on the streets of our city," Zohran Mamdani said on Monday, adding that "each life lost is a tragedy, and we will continue to hold their families in our thoughts". While...